The Voting News Daily: Ex-Felon Voting Rights in AK and FL, KY Officials Sentenced in Vote Buying Scheme
AK: Felon voting rights bill passes first committee but may face opposition later – The Republic
The Alaska Senate State Affairs Committee on Tuesday advanced a bill allowing felons the right to vote, despite concerns from one lawmaker. Republican Sen. Cathy Giessel of Anchorage says her constituents were concerned that the bill would absolve felons of their crimes before they had fully paid their debt to society. Read More
More than 11,000 registered Colorado voters were not U.S. citizens at the time they obtained a driver’s license, according to a review by Secretary of State Scott Gessler. The department is certain that 106 of these voters were improperly registered because they presented the state Department of Revenue with a noncitizen document after the date they registered to vote. Gessler and Rep. Chris Holbert, R-Parker, are pushing legislation that would allow the secretary of state to check the statewide voter database to determine whether registered voters are in fact citizens. Read More
DC: Libertarian Party Loses District of Columbia Write-in Vote Counting Case – Ballot Access News
On March 8, U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell, an Obama appointee, ruled against the Libertarian Party, which was seeking a court order to require the Election Board to count write-in votes for Bob Barr in the November 2008 election. Barr was the only presidential candidate who had filed a declaration of write-in candidacy. Judge Howell upheld the constitutionality of refusing to count the write-ins for a declared write-in presidential candidate, unless the vote-counting computer believes that a write-in candidate might have won the election. Here is the 23-page opinion. In 1972, supporters of Benjamin Spock, presidential candidate of the Peoples Party, had filed a lawsuit to obtain write-in space for president on general election ballots in the District of Columbia. That case was called Kamins v Board of Elections, and was in the D.C. Court system, not the federal court system. The D.C. Court of Appeals said, “The Board was in error when it failed to count appellant’s vote…The fundamental nature of the right involved persuades us that construction of the statute in favor of the franchise is the course which we must follow.” On remand to the D.C. Superior Court, that lower court wrote, “Ordered, that the Defendant Board of Elections count the names of write-in candidates for President and Vice-President, provided said write-in candidate has a qualified slate of electors whose names and affidavits have been filed with the Defendant Board of Elections.” Notwithstanding that court order, the D.C. Board of Elections has never tallied the write-in votes for any write-in presidential candidate in the general election. After the Kamins decision, the Board passed a regulation saying only the total number of all presidential write-ins must be counted, and that no count need be made of how many write-ins any individual candidate received, unless the total number of write-ins showed a write-in candidate might have won.